Climbing up to Common Ground

If we’re going to turn our energies toward understanding and overcoming our innate fascination with clamoring mobs of angry masses fed by talking points, we have to start on the most difficult of all terrain—our inner landscape.

Do you think you are a practitioner of peace? Do you think you can easily sort fact from fiction and give all perspectives an equal sense of consideration? Then tell me this…how’s your family dynamic? How do you handle conflict in your closest relationships?

True understanding is something we must learn to cultivate in the deepest corners of ourselves, where we have nurtured our knee-jerk reaction to conflict—those times you don’t get to step back and think, much less retreat to a mountain top where you can gain a wise and peace-centered perspective.

Our true colors are often shown in the way we respond to the people who we interact with most—our family. If you live with other humans…or even pets…you are probably already aware that they are all safe landing places for the unfiltered versions of yourself and that sometimes, you’re not nearly as nice as you’d like to be remembered.

Beyond your front door, consider the way you interact with extend family and friends. How will you feel going back to that family or class reunion this summer? Are you already playing out scenarios in your mind that could easily be categorized as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly? Our brains hold onto past experiences and we allow ourselves to project the future through those filters. Is that fair? No. Do you want someone to approach their next encounter with you based on feelings that you hurt 15 years ago or a callous remark you didn’t even realize stung them? No. So why can’t we make ourselves give one another fresh starts?

Because I think I should be able to teach my brain a thing or two, I wrote my friend Marcia Reynolds, PhD , and asked her for help. You can send in questions to Marcia, too on her nifty facebook site! I attended one of Marcia’s workshops last year in which she explained that our brains function a lot like an LP Record (she describes this well in her book Outsmart Your Brain ). We lay down our thoughts which become our habits and responses just as tracks are laid into the album’s vinyl. We can teach ourselves new ways of thinking, but those old grooves still exist and conflict may make us skip right back into them. (This analogy may be lost all those too young to have a clue how you can make an LP record skip by bumping the stereo!)

I wanted Marcia to give me a magic remedy…something that would help me feel in those grooves and enable me to start each encounter with a fresh perspective and a truly open heart. What she gave me isn’t magic, but it’s a great tool and maybe it will help you, too…

…you know erasing the habitual reactions we have with family members is the hardest of all. They are grooved very deeply in our brains.

The best thing is to catch your biological reactions before you open your mouth. When you begin to feel irritated, impatient or frustrated, notice where you feel this in your body. The quicker you can identify when your stomach is tightening up or your shoulders tense up, the sooner you can stop and ask yourself, “What does my brain think this person is not giving me?” Respect? Acknowledgment? Control? Then, either ask for what you need or if you think that is a waste of time, let it go while focusing on why you love this person (if you do) or at least on the fact that they are human too with crazy needs. Try compassion. That always works for me.

Marcia

I just had a chance to test this theory in the last 30 seconds! The phone rang and caller ID revealed it to be a political call from one of my least favorite politicians. I answered it because I thought, “I’m going to get this number, call it back and explain the 101 reasons I don’t care to ever hear from this man again!” I felt my jaw and shoulders tighten and thought, WAIT! (Another of Marcia’s great bits of wisdom is her acronym for WAIT—Why Am I Talking!?) Why did I feel the need to correct some poor campaign volunteer on this state senator’s staff. To use the Buddhist three-way test we’ve discussed before…would my words be true? (only from my emotional perspective) Would they be kind? (Probably not, even though I may have used my “nice” voice) Would they improve the silence? (No. Even though I often think the whole world would be better off if I could just visit with a few key people…)

Let’s work toward building greater understanding by looking first toward the small encounters with other beings—the way we treat telemarketers; the way we treat the insolent or disconnected people who provide us poor service; the way we respond to the sound of a candidate’s voice or a commentator’s opinion… Let’s start there, with all those who we don’t know or who can’t talk back. Then let’s expand our efforts to start anew with those we know and have deep preconceptions about. What if we just let them be who they are rather than who we perceive them to be? Does our opinion of them matter? No. But dislike is really just the bud that blooms into hate, and if you’re carrying much of that around in the soil of your soul, it should matter to you.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (maybe it’s time to embroider us each a pillow…) if it’s worth feeling angry or guilty about, it’s worth doing something about. If it’s not worth doing something about or if it doesn’t meet the three way test mentioned above…then Let It Go. Make space in your soul for goodness. Listen with all your heart to better understand rather than to judge. If we begin to do this in our personal lives, we’ll be ready to do it in our public lives. We will train our spirits to seek first the higher ground of common good…and the world will be the better for our efforts.

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bithu 5 pts

True advice to be followed for your mental peace and good for everyone around you! It is up to us to see that we live in peaceful co-existence with our fellow beings and one of the greatest lessons I have learnt in life is that if we want to be happy then we should change our habits instead of hoping to change others - as we can control our thoughts and actions which is not the case when it is with others! So le us understand others and try to make allowances for their faults instead of the other way round!!http://portablegeneratorreviews.net"

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